Simple ways to increase your newsletter subscriptions

In the words of the well-known internet Guru, Jakob Nielsen “Email newsletters are the best way to maintain customer relationships on the internet”. Most businesses have a newsletter and get good amounts of traffic from that marketing route, but gaining new subscribers has not always been very easy.

In this article I am going to present you with four some simple and easy ways that you can implement and increase the subscriptions to your newsletter.

Using those simple tricks you can increase your newsletter subscription rates without the need to change your newsletter marketing strategy, by just changing small details of how you ask people to subscribe to your newsletter.

1: Position your subscription box correctly

It is very important to have a prominent subscription box if you want people to notice it and subscribe to you. Having the subscription box on the right side of your website in a separate box means that people will easily find it and will not have to start searching within your website to find the subscription box. Avoid hiding it at the bottom of the page orin different secondary pages.

In this example, B2B wholesaler Bomb Cosmetics have placed the email signup call to action prominently on the right hand main banner of their home page:

Testing the location, size, and colour of your email sign up can yield benefits in terms of numbers of new subscribers.

2: Design a prominent subscription box

Just having the subscription box in a nice position on the webpage is not enough to draw the attention of the user though. You should make sure that the colours you are using on the call to action buttons are vibrant and draw the attention of the users. On the example below you can see the vibrant colours with the contrast on the Sign Me Up button that are guaranteed to draw the user’s attention.

You should also be very careful with the wording you use on those buttons. For example Chris Spooner experimented with changing the text on his subscription buttons and increased his daily subscriptions more than 10 times. Below you can see the different wording he used in each case.

As you can see the changes are only in the text inside the buttons. This small little change though still had a huge impact in the subscription numbers of his newsletter.

3: Offer something in return

People love free stuff. Consider offering some free downloads or something in general in return for subscribing to your newsletter. This “something” can be anything from simple how-to guides to calendars. Let people know what they will be getting back if they subscribe.

As you can see in this example, it is a variation of the example used above. Still, it is clear that when you subscribe you will be given a free guide making very clear that you get something in return for subscribing to the newsletter.

4: Make the subscription form as simple as possible

Having too many fields for users to complete will cause a lot of them to go away and never subscribe. Subscribing to your newsletter should be dead easy with as less fields as possible. Reducing the sign up fields to the essentials such as email and name, can cause a big increase in your newsletter subscriptions. As you can see from all the examples above, they all have up to two fields and avoid complicated subscription boxes. People are able to subscribe with just a click of a button once they have typed in their email.

Try out these simple ways of increasing your newsletter subscriptions and do not be afraid to experiment with different positions or designs for your newsletter subscription panel. You can also try Split Testing your subscription forms with this very detailed guide from our blog to optimize for the best results.